Voter targeting becomes voter surveillance

Political candidates have always done everything in their power to target voters. But in the current election cycle, with primary election season officially under way, technology is giving them a lot more power than before.

It is at the point where privacy advocates are referring to it as “voter surveillance.”

Bruce Schneier, author, blogger and CTO of Resilient Systems, wrote in his recent book “Data and Goliath” that voter surveillance data can cause “unique harms” to the political process due to, “personalized marketing's capability to discriminate as a way to track voting patterns and better ‘sell’ a candidate or policy position.”